Ragged Lady, the — Complete eBook

carried so far to the rear when the garment was reduced
at the waist. At the same time her own dresses
of ten years earlier would not half meet round her;
and one of the most corroding cares of a woman who
had done everything a woman could to get rid of care,
was what to do with those things which they could
neither of them ever wear again. She talked the
matter over with herself before her husband, till
he took the desperate measure of sending them back
to storage; and they had been left there in the spring
when the Landers came away for the summer.

They always spent the later spring months at a hotel
in the suburbs of Boston, where they arrived in May
from a fortnight in a hotel at New York, on their
way up from hotels in Washington, Ashville, Aiken and
St. Augustine. They passed the summer months
in the mountains, and early in the autumn they went
back to the hotel in the Boston suburbs, where Mrs.
Lander considered it essential to make some sojourn
before going to a Boston hotel for November and December,
and getting ready to go down to Florida in January.
She would not on any account have gone directly to
the city from the mountains, for people who did that
were sure to lose the good of their summer, and to
feel the loss all the winter, if they did not actually
come down with a fever.

She was by no means aware that she was a selfish or
foolish person. She made Mr. Lander subscribe
statedly to worthy objects in Boston, which she still
regarded as home, because they had not dwelt any where
else since they ceased to live there; and she took
lavishly of tickets for all the charitable entertainments
in the hotels where they stayed. Few if any
guests at hotels enjoyed so much honor from porters,
bell-boys, waiters, chambermaids and bootblacks as
the Landers, for they gave richly in fees for every
conceivable service which could be rendered them; they
went out of their way to invent debts of gratitude
to menials who had done nothing for them. He
would make the boy who sold papers at the dining-room
door keep the change, when he had been charged a profit
of a hundred per cent. already; and she would let
no driver who had plundered them according to the
carriage tariff escape without something for himself.

A sense of their munificence penetrated the clerks
and proprietors with a just esteem for guests who
always wanted the best of everything, and questioned
no bill for extras. Mrs. Lander, in fact, who
ruled these expenditures, had no knowledge of the
value of things, and made her husband pay whatever
was asked. Yet when they lived under their own
roof they had lived simply, and Lander had got his
money in an old-fashioned business way, and not in
some delirious speculation such as leaves a man reckless
of money afterwards. He had been first of all
a tailor, and then he had gone into boys’ and
youths’ clothing in a small way, and finally
he had mastered this business and come out at the top,
with his hands full. He invested his money so
prosperously that the income for two elderly people,
who had no children, and only a few outlying relations
on his side, was far beyond their wants, or even their
whims.